The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) and Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit against the Trump Administration on behalf of NWLC and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement for illegally rolling back critical pay transparency requirements intended to root out discrimination and close the wage gap.
At issue is the Trump administration’s decision to block what is known as the EEOC’s EEO-1 equal pay data collection.
After six years of analysis, the EEOC concluded that collecting employee pay data was necessary to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws. In August, the Trump Administration abruptly reversed the prior approval of this data collection.
Without the requirements, roughly 60,886 employers —who collectively employ 63 million workers—are empowered to continue shielding race and gender pay gaps from scrutiny.
“Equal pay cannot be achieved without transparency, bottom line,” says WLP Managing Attorney Terry L. Fromson, who has testified before the House Democratic Policy Committee in Philadelphia on the persistence of the wage gap and proposed policy solutions. Fromson also testified in support of Philadelphia City Council’s ban on relying on prior pay as a basis for wage decisions and co-authored, along with WLP Staff Attorney Amal Bass, an amicus curaie brief on behalf of WLP and 27 organizations supporting the constitutionality of that ordinance, which has been challenged by business interests.
In just the last year, equal pay initiatives have been aggressively blocked on the federal, state, and local levels.
Legislation to close the loopholes in the state equal pay law continue to be neglected, despite robust evidence of the need to update the law. Pennsylvania adopted an Equal Pay Act in 1959, then weakened it less than a decade later to reduce the number of employees it applies to. Our equal pay law only applies to a very small number of Pennsylvanians.
Our refusal to update equal pay law shows in our sky-high wage gap: Pennsylvania’s wage gap is larger and more persistent than the nation’s average. If current trends continue, Pennsylvania women are not projected to earn equal pay until 2068. That estimate is an average, because the wage gap is much wider for women of color than white women. White women will not see equal pay until 2056. Black women will not see pay equity until 2124, while Hispanic women must wait 231 more years until 2248.
Since state legislators against workplace equality know they can’t simply ignore the issue forever, they floated a fake fix that would actually reverse the state’s meager protections while stalling on real legislative solutions.
To close the gender wage gap, we need strategic policy solutions that support wage transparency on the local, state and federal level.
The Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing the rights of women and girls.
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